Like many people, I keep asking myself What else can I do? How do I bring my professional skills to the immense problems facing our world? I’m talking about the big stuff: racial and economic injustice, a devastating pandemic, the climate crisis, and now, the presence of armed federal officers tear gassing and abducting protesters in the city where I live. Can I contribute in any truly meaningful way?
Read MoreI’m super excited to be reading from my new book Make Love Better: How to Own Your Story, Connect with Your Partner and Deepen Your Relationship Practice, at the Process Work Institute at 7pm on Thursday September 19th. I’ll share about my writing journey, talk about some of the key concepts, and read excerpts from the book.
To give you a sense of what’s really important to me, here’s a short excerpt from the end of the Introduction.
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The Message in a Smile
I haven’t changed nearly as much as I’d hoped.
A couple of years ago, I made some short videos about various relationship topics. Recently, after I announced the upcoming publication of my book Make Love Better, some of these videos have circulated on social media. It’s always been challenging for me to watch myself on video—not sure if that will ever change. But what struck me most in this video (topic: navigating relationship when your partner’s political beliefs are antithetical to your own), was not so much what I said, but how I said it.
What struck me was my smile. Which made me smile. And blush in front of myself.
Allow me to explain.
Read MoreWell, I did it. I wrote a book.
I’m thrilled to announce that Make Love Better: How to Own Your Story, Connect with Your Partner and Deepen Your Relationship Practice is now available. You can purchase it here, or on Amazon and in stores November 1, 2019.
Read MoreI discovered something. There’s a background reason that I blog—and I wasn’t fully aware of it.
I knew the reasons in front: To bring out my thinking and dreaming, to share personal experiences that might inspire others, to offer tools for navigating and finding meaning in tough experiences, to teach skills to people who coach or counsel others. A deep wish: for things to be easier, more facile for you than they have been for me, especially in relationship.
Read More“The belief that one’s own view of reality is the only reality is the most dangerous of all delusions.” Paul Watzlawick, 1976. From Forward to How Real is Real.
George Carlin put it like this: When you are driving behind a slow person who you want to pass, they are an asshole. When someone behind you tries to pass you, they are a maniac.
We laugh—because it’s true; we see ourselves. In this case it’s especially embarrassing (even idiotic) that we believe we are right, whatever our position. And it does nothing to help us get along or understand our lover or our neighbor.
As the old AA saying goes: Would you rather be right, or in relationship?
Multiple versions of reality, some contradictory, all are the result of divergent experiences and communication processes, none a reflection of an external, eternal, objective truth.
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I’m desperately upset about the president-elect of the United States, and the children in Aleppo, and our fragile planet, and so much else. I wake up in the night, scared or angry or hurting, and I can’t get back to sleep. I get obsessed with hating him for so many things, not the least of which is his abhorrent use of power.
So the other night, in the middle of the night, I got to thinking about my power—and how I use it. And then I did some inner work—a simple thought experiment that I’ll share with you here.
Read MoreWhen I’m upset, it’s always physical. My heart actually aches. My stomach comes undone. I feel a knife stabbing my back or twisting into the base of my neck. I’ve always been that way.
So it was no surprise that when Jerry and I arrived home on the evening of November 8th, 2016 after having witnessed the devastating, disorienting election results at the house of close friends, I climbed the stairs, brushed my teeth, walked towards my bed, fell to the floor and moaned. This went on. Apparently, I made a lot of noise.
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We all make mistakes. Ghosts from past errors and indiscretions come back to haunt us, if not in real life, then in our dreams. Most of us handle this in the relative privacy of our inner lives, our relationships and small communities.
If you’re in the public eye, and meant to lead a country, mistakes of judgment have serious impact.
In the creative fields and in entrepreneurship, it is seen as vogue to make mistakes, to fail and iterate. Design thinking luminaries assure us that that if we keep making mistakes and tinkering something interesting will happen—we will do our best work.
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Donald Trump is in love with me.
I know. It’s awful. But here’s why it’s true, here’s what is (sometimes) inside my head:
Make me great. Make me richer and more beautiful. Make me do well at whatever I attempt. Give me stamina. I don’t want to be sick or weak or get pneumonia. I don’t want this hearing loss—it’s embarrassing. Fix the skin that hangs from under my chin. Heal the capsulitis on the ball of my foot. Make me smarter, more able-bodied and minded. Make my mind quick again—I never used to lose a word or name when I needed it. Help me build a wall to keep out all distractions, symptoms, critical voices and vulnerable feelings. Make me better than others; make me the best. Dear god, I used to be so tough and strong—please make me great again.
And with this inner attitude, I help elect Trump. That’s why he loves me, in my dream.
Read MorePower is a huge source of conflict in the world. Intimate relationships have great potential to play a strong part in leveling playing fields.
Romantic love relationships between men and women reproduce sexism and gender inequality. Romantic love between black and white Americans reproduces racism and brings up the trauma of slavery. Romantic love between Jews and Christians of German descent or between American and Japanese people reproduce agonies from WW2. Because of the intimate context, these cross-cultural relationships provide fertile ground for the disruption of historical wounds.
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It is never easy to be criticized or accused. If our inner world is filled with self-dislike, any outer challenge is a double whammy to our fragile sense of self. So we shut our ears and hearts. We defend. We protect ourselves. Or we get mired in our own defeat.
Read MoreWhy is it difficult for a justice-seeking, well-intentioned white person (me) to dig down and investigate the dehumanizing effects of racism (or any other ism) on myself? Or to challenge others within my own group to do the same? Why is it easier to focus on issues out there, instead of inside?
There are many possible answers, and so much complexity and nuance when addressing issues of privilege and oppression. Social problems need to be tackled from many angles, including the psychological.
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To demolish racism you have to dismantle the system. You have to dismantle the parts—the beliefs, the attitudes, the values and the behaviors. ... We have to dismantle the culture of white utopia. Kevin Jones (on OPB’s State of Wonder, April 16, 2016)
Most people I talk to feel very unsettled. As it should be. Things are heating up.
I go to sleep worrying. I wake up pressured to act, to somehow be helpful. Mostly I don’t know how or what to do. So when I experience something that feels transformative, that I believe does make a difference, I want to shout it out.
Last week, in the midst of everything bad, I witnessed the power of art, specifically theatre, to create a situation that almost forcedpeople to empathize. I've written before about this special power of art. Sarah Lewis calls it aesthetic force. Not force by gunfire. Not force that maims or leaves us lifeless. But force that leaves us “changed—stunned, dazzled and knocked out.”
Read MoreApparently, falling in love is easy—even in a laboratory setting. A social psychology researcher named Dr Arthur Aron, who studies the science of intimacy, developed 36 questions that call for increasing self-revelation and honesty. Share your answers to these questions with a relative stranger and there’s a good chance the two of you will fall in love. Writer Mandy Len Catron became a minor celebrity after she published a story in the Modern Love column of the New York Times about how she fell in love with her current partner using Dr Aron’s method.
Read MoreOn Orlando: Some Feeling-Thoughts
Last Thursday night, four days after the deadly massacre at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, I attended a vigil at the Q Center in Portland Oregon. Like many people, I had been moving through the week in a daze of grief, anger, fear and hopelessness, trying to wrap my brain around the complexity of the intersecting, colliding and exploding issues that ended in the horrific rampage. Over 100 shot and 49 killed, mostly LGBTQ, mostly under age 30, the worst massacre ever perpetrated by an armed US citizen with a legally purchased assault rifle designed to destroy as many people as possible in as short a time as possible.
Read More“Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.” Scott Adams
In the creative fields and in entrepreneurship, it is vogue to fail and iterate. Design thinking luminaries like IDEO founders Tom and David Kelly urge us to embrace our failures, to own them and to use the learning on our path to doing great and original things. But failing in relationship is not generally held in quite so high esteem; rather the contrary, even today in the US where divorce rates hover somewhere between 40– 50%, people who have more than two or three long term relationships or marriages under their belts by mid life are looked at sideways. We cluck our tongues, call them unlucky in love; we label their deeply personal experiences failed relationships.
Read MoreSomeone I love dearly no longer feels relevant. This saddens me. I tell her how important she is—to me, to many people close to her, to the readers of the newspaper column she’s been writing since her retirement twenty years ago. I tell her that she doesn’t need to interrupt or assert, that she is in fact central, especially because of her kindness, her helpfulness and her fierce love that didn’t used to shine with quite the same intensity. But she is of an age considered old in consensual time and has not adjusted easily to the brutality of ageism. For reasons unexplained, she gets the not delivered message, despite the fact her texts are indeed received. A technical (cultural) glitch confirming she isn’t being heard. This makes her frantic.
Read MoreSometimes we do things we don’t feel great about. Well, perhaps I should speak for myself.
It started with sneaking out a few pens and some travel-sized toiletries—toothpaste, mouthwash, mini dental flosses. The habit ramped up and five years down the road, when there was no way I could get caught, I was slipping unopened 5 packs of notepads, sturdy paperclips that they just don’t make anymore and a box or two of zip lock bags— into my bag. Hey, it's not like I went rifling through her bedroom drawers while she was sleeping; these items were all out and obvious.
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Discomfort is kicking my ass today. It’s that twitchy feeling I sometimes get in my chest when I have to do something hard and an inner voice is telling me I suck and since there’s no way I’ll succeed, I may as well put it off. Procrastinate.
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